Sources of Anti-Secularism in Modern Turkey: A Social History Approach

Murat Metinsoy

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2024, vol. 26, issue 6, 832-850

Abstract: The secular reforms the young Republic of Turkey launched during the interwar period were one of the most comprehensive modernization schemes in the world history. These extraordinary reforms have been considered as the sole maker of today’s Turkey. The political histories, focusing on formal politics, mostly reduced the social opposition to secularism to a few well-known hapless protests and rebellions. This article, however, argues that modern Turkey was the culmination of a more complicated process in which popular opposition to these reforms also shaped politics. It reveals that the daily life of ordinary people, particularly in rural areas, was rife with the anti-secular voices and attitudes by exploring non-elite public spheres and popular discursive strategies though which anti-secular opinions and attitudes were produced and expressed. Rather than seeing them as a result of clash between secularism and religion, it emphasizes the socio-economic reasons that lead to people’s negative response, primarily the loss of authority or economic advantages of some groups due to reforms. Finally this article offers that the roots of the Islamist politics of the following decades could be sought in this popular dissent, which subtly contested the secularism’s hegemony in daily life during the early republic.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/19448953.2024.2310893

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